1 Modelling Symmetry:
Proper modelling symmetry that does not require cutting your mesh in half and messing your Uvs up. †Also the ability to re symmetry a model. I think this is something Maxon will have to do.

2: †Mocap on rigs with FK controllers.
Using C4D Studio character tool will not work with retargetting. †Modos, ACS Kit does work with IK/FK blending on top of a retarget mocap.

3: Face rig and Lip sync.
Facial rig that works with the Character tool or any rig, and has Lip sync.

4: Hair tool enhancments
The ability to easily save and apply hair styles to geometry with auto scale and adjustment.
The ability to make polytails with ease
The ability to produce hair based on geometry.

Originally Posted by JoelDubin:Yep thats it! †Quite an amzing piece of software there---and free.†
Still would be good to have more options for retopo in c4d

The Instant Meshes algorithm is implemented in Modo since V 10.2 for retopolog. So getting it into C4D should be doable.

The most amazing time-saving plugin in my opinion would be a highly advanced metaball/multi-object skinning/shrinkwrapping plugin that lets you stick a bunch of 3D objects together and can pull a single quadmesh skin with animation-ready topology over those objects.

To give an example:

1) Model a simple 3D head shape mesh with no features on it
2) Model separate 3D objects for the neck, lips, ears, eyebrows, cheekbones, jawline and so forth
3) Position everything where it belongs and hit "Skin Operator On"
4) If this thing is a live function, you now have a great looking 3D character head mesh, but with the option to move facial features about and edit them - e.g. make the nose wider or replace the nose with a different mesh, move the eyebrows or cheekbones higher or lower, make the jawline wider, move the ears further back on the head and rotate them a bit, make the neck more muscular or more feminine and so on

I cannot think of a 3D modeling plugin that would do more to save time than this skinning function, which could be used for anything from creating realistic characters to car modeling.

Another plus of this plugin - if it can create a good quadmesh for just about any 3D shape then boom, you have built a great autoretopology tool as well.

So its really a live multi-object skinning plugin + also a retopology tool. When your topology is really crap (e.g. a CAD model) just pull a new quadmesh skin over it and tweak some sliders until it looks good.

Originally Posted by christianS:The other thing are more procedural poly modelling tools, like the bevel-deformer, but for other operations. For example: dynamic projection of a spline onto a surface, which is then used to:
- create depressed / raised lines on the model
- create selections which can then be extruded and so on in a non-destructive manner

Originally Posted by skeebertus:The Instant Meshes algorithm is implemented in Modo since V 10.2 for retopolog. So getting it into C4D should be doable.

The most amazing time-saving plugin in my opinion would be a highly advanced metaball/multi-object skinning/shrinkwrapping plugin that lets you stick a bunch of 3D objects together and can pull a single quadmesh skin with animation-ready topology over those objects.

To give an example:

1) Model a simple 3D head shape mesh with no features on it
2) Model separate 3D objects for the neck, lips, ears, eyebrows, cheekbones, jawline and so forth
3) Position everything where it belongs and hit "Skin Operator On"
4) If this thing is a live function, you now have a great looking 3D character head mesh, but with the option to move facial features about and edit them - e.g. make the nose wider or replace the nose with a different mesh, move the eyebrows or cheekbones higher or lower, make the jawline wider, move the ears further back on the head and rotate them a bit, make the neck more muscular or more feminine and so on

I cannot think of a 3D modeling plugin that would do more to save time than this skinning function, which could be used for anything from creating realistic characters to car modeling.

Another plus of this plugin - if it can create a good quadmesh for just about any 3D shape then boom, you have built a great autoretopology tool as well.

So its really a live multi-object skinning plugin + also a retopology tool. When your topology is really crap (e.g. a CAD model) just pull a new quadmesh skin over it and tweak some sliders until it looks good.

Sounds great--and sounds like a lot of what z-brush and 3d coat do (and I guess houdini).
Parametric retopo stuff is useful in what I do so always looking for workflows and tools that help with that.

FYI--you might want to check out †the artist Merk, as he has been posting a lot of great parametric workflow tips.

Originally Posted by JoelDubin:Sounds great--and sounds like a lot of what z-brush and 3d coat do (and I guess houdini).
Parametric retopo stuff is useful in what I do so always looking for workflows and tools that help with that.

Where I believe multi-object skinning is really powerful is much faster base model creation.

You could create a human arm by positioning two cylinders for the upper and lower arm, having spheres for the shoulder and elbow joints, plus maybe a subdivided matchbox shaped object where the hand would attach to the rest of the arm.

You'd then place some stretched spheres on the arm cylinders to get basic arm muscle definition, and when you model extruded fingers onto your hand matchbox, or create the fingers again from simple cylinders and sphere joints, you'd get a human hand as well.

Then you'd create a basic torso shaped mesh extruded from a cube, stick your cylinders + spheres + hand construction onto it, and the skinning operator would give you a torso with attached arm in one flowing quadmesh.

To give the torso proper muscle definition you'd again stick things like stretched spheres or very basic muscle-shaped polygon objects onto it, and now you'd have a pretty good approximation of human anatomy.

The advantage would be that this is all non-destructive. So if you need to give your character more chest muscle definition or a longer and thinner upper arm, or you want to replace the nose and mouth of the character to create another character, you'd simply be updating the simple sub-objects that the final quadmesh skin is pulled over.

This, in my view, is much simpler and also more flexible than having to constantly worry about mesh flow, edge flow and other topology issues in trying to model a whole human character with all its features onto a single polygon mesh.

Car modeling would also get much quicker. You could again place a reference image in your viewport, block out the main shape of a car with cubes, spheres and simple custom modeled mesh objects, and pull a smooth flowing skin over the whole construction.

For exploratory product design - for example a pair of music headphones whose final shape is still up in the air - this would be heaven, too.

Each time a radical design change is made or requested from you, you wouldn't have to worry about topology at all. You could simply modify or switch out the sub-objects that make up the overall headphone shape, and quickly pull a new skin over it.

This probably won't give you the exact polygon count efficiency that a good manual mesh modeling specialist might achieve.

But in 2017 that's an issue for low poly realtime games mostly. For rendered CG, being able to get to your final model in 3 to 4 hours as opposed to 15 - 20 hours might make it well worthwhile to work with a composite 3D object that has more polygons than a traditionally modeled 3D object might, but is also far easier to alter than a traditional static mesh.

What is most powerful about this idea is the construction-kit aspect of it. You could have a collection of different heads, torsos, arms and legs in your content browser, and just stick them together like a construction kit when you need to create a new character.

The idea also allows modeling from an animation rig up. You could first create a bone rig of the character you want to create. Then you snap various poly objects onto the bone rig to define the volume of the character.

The skin operator now gives you a quadmesh skin that is already rigged for basic animation and posing, because the sub objects that define the skinned character shape are attached to bones on a an animation rig and can move and rotate with those bones.

Just to illustrate what my proposed plugin might look like, here are images from Lightwave's Meta Mesh and Shrink Wrap Plus plugins that are sort of relevant.

What I propose is a far more advanced technology than this - a fast, clean quadmesh topology generating multi-object live skinning plugin - but if you have no idea what that might look like in practice, take a† look at the LW plugin images below:

Here's a Youtube video from 2013 that shows Lightwave's heatshrink in action:

You could actually do this using cloth simulation - create a cloth object with clean quad topology around a number of 3D collision objects, and have the cloth tighten until it sits on those objects like a tight skin.

That would be slow and CPU intensive - too slow for practical animation use on complex characters for example.

So the best way would probably be to take something like C4D's Metaball function and improve it to the point where it is very fast, predictable and easily controllable.

I bet that there are tons of computer graphics research papers on the internet that detail how such a feat can be accomplished without slowing a PC/MAC to a crawl.

My recommendation would be to run this technique on the GPU from the get go - here you have hundreds of little processing cores that can calculate quickly where different sections of the generated quadmesh skin sit on the underlying collision/construction objects.

For many common 3D modeling tasks, such a skinning function (done really well of course) would be priceless.

Originally Posted by Lex1968:Polytrans does a fair job, but still a lot of clean up work remains afterwards. importing CAD models should be made easier indeed....

Yeah it's the best thing out there but it's also not cheap and not without its own share of quirks, including the UI. It is PC only (understandably since virtually all of the CAD software is PC only). But if I'm paying $400-500 for a plugin to do conversions, I want minimal cleanup on a first pass and ideally I'd want it to be available on Mac (although that may change).

But there's basically zero competition for PolyTrans out there. There are some hacked together free plugins and the like but they're nowhere close to being a full-featured solution to the problem in question. So this is a good avenue / low barrier to entry if someone is looking to make a few bucks on a CAD plugin.

Originally Posted by JoelDubin:I havent played around with R19's Poly reduction tool so maybe this is already done, but it would be great to have a built in retopo tool like zremesher, dynamesh or the other tool (forget the name!) that subdivides and reduces based on areas with more or less detail. Maybe something like that built into metaballs? There is the free tool thats out there too †but cant think of that name either. Dang I'm getting old I guess.†

If someone wants to take a stab at a more robust replacement to NET render that wold be nice too
Then we could yell at you when our jobs crash.

Yeah....no, it's still not anywhere near that. That would be fantastic, however, so I second this one.†

And a String animating system, like imagine animating tying knots with string †and making them look natural. Somebody needs to make something like this badly.†

Originally Posted by Blinny:But there's basically zero competition for PolyTrans out there. There are some hacked together free plugins and the like but they're nowhere close to being a full-featured solution to the problem in question. So this is a good avenue / low barrier to entry if someone is looking to make a few bucks on a CAD plugin.

Loading CAD files isn't easy - they usually contain complex NURBS and Solid Modeled objects, rather than polygons or vertices.

Far more doable is a post CAD-import polygons cleanup tool.

It'll take some R&D - vertices and polygons can be tricky to work with.

But it can be done.

Things would probably go faster if someone can send the developer good ideas for HOW precisely this polygon cleanup tool should do what it does.

As in visual diagrams that show: "Here's the rounded edge of a poorly polygonized CAD model. If the plugin could draw a quad here, and a quad here, and merge this triangle with that triangle..." and so forth.

Its not really programming such a plugin that's difficult. It is figuring out the actual METHOD or STRATEGY used by the plugin to clean up the bad CAD topology.

If you can figure that out and create step-by-step illustrations showing precisely how the topology gets improved, then a programmer can take a crack at making it happen in a plugin.

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